Historical Reality and Flights of Fancy

In Lisbon, during the second half of 1709, a Brazilian-born priest and inventor, Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, made a number of attempts to launch a balloon-type apparatus. Eventually the craft, popularly known as the Passarola (Great Bird), took off from the heights of St George's castle, overlooking the centre of the city, and apparently carried Lourenço down to the vicinity of the River Tagus – a distance of about one kilometre.

Father Bartolomeu Lourenço, who was referred to in his day as ‘the flying man’ (Corrêa Neves, p. 19), is one of the principal characters of José Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda (1982). In the novel, his Passarola, now evolved into a craft with the appearance of a bird-cum-boat, is shown to be capable of flying many kilometres, at speed, and at a considerable height. In an interview published in 1986, Saramago noted that, although he saw himself as very much a realist writer, his novels all revealed some element of the fantastic. But he has also stressed the importance of history to works of fiction, asserting that every novel is, in a sense, a historical novel. Indeed, in his novels of the 1980s – Raised from the Earth (1980), Baltasar and Blimunda, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), The Stone Raft (1986), and The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989) – Saramago draws, at times heavily, on historical material. Thus the narrative action of both Baltasar and Blimunda and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, two of the three works I wish to look at in terms of history, the fantastic, and magical realism, is firmly pegged to specific events of clearly defined historical periods. Baltasar and Blimunda, which contains numerous, precise historical and chronological markers, covers much of the first half of the eighteenth century. The narrative development of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, although chronologically much more restricted (covering the period from the closing days of December 1935 to the end of August 1936), reveals, by means of the introduction of news stories and the comments of various characters, political and historical events of those eight months.